The Viennese-born snapper who recorded social injustice in Britain

‘Poverty for Sale: Edith Tudor Hart in Britain’, edited by Shirley Read

Museumsetc.com, £38

Too few people know of Edith Tudor Hart. Born into a Jewish Viennese family in 1908, she was a gifted and dedicated photographer who studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau and whose camera was her means of survival both economically, and as part of her mission to record, critique and campaign against social inequalities and deprivation.

Her father and uncle owned a Social Democratic bookshop and printing press, and as a child politics was integral to her life. Yet the rise of fascism necessitated in 1933 her non-observant family's flight and exile to Britain where she made good on her determination to use her art to express her communist politics.

Poverty for Sale focuses on her 40  years in Britain, where she specialised in un-posed “street” photography to record the lives of the poor, not merely as victims but as class militants, fighting for workers’ rights and survival. It contains more than 200 black-and-white images, the majority in full-sized square plates and – for the first time – a selection drawn from Tudor Hart’s own scrap books. The text is composed of 17 essays, each taking a different aspect of the life and work, contextualising it within the wider political and photographic movements of the times.

The cover shot is an arresting image from the series on the Caledonian Road Market. It includes a self-portrait, with Tudor Hart staring down into her chest-held Rollei, beside an “Unknown Man”, reflected in an old swing mirror chalked with a price (37/6). It appeared in the left-wing Austrian magazine Der Kuckuk with Tudor Hart’s German text characterising the market as “a trading place for the poorest of the poor”. In her essay Every Day a War Beate Pittnaueit wrote:

“Economic hardship on London’s streets describes how Tudor Hart “presents herself as a documenter of London’s pavement trade, a world she encountered as a site of struggle for existence”.

Yet Tudor Hart was also a spy. She was an associate of the Eastern European spy Arnold Deutsch and became instrumental in recruiting members of the Cambridge spy ring including Kim Philby and Arthur Wynn. When Philby was arrested in 1952, Tudor-Hart burned many of her negatives in an attempt to protect herself and M15 could never gather enough evidence to arrest her.

I met Tudor Hart’s younger brother and fellow photographer Wolf Suschitzky when the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography commissioned an entry on Edith Tudor Hart in 2004. Wolf and I became friends, meeting regularly and lunching on the canal boat restaurant below his flat in Little Venice until Wolf’s death in 2016. Throughout, Wolf insisted that his sister was never a political subversive, pursued by MI5. Rather, her accounts that they entered her flat and destroyed her films in her absence or tailed her on the streets were the fantasies of a woman seriously afflicted by cancer: Tudor-Hart died of the disease in 1978. With hindsight it would seem that Wolf was attempting to protect his sister’s reputation and legacy as a photographer. Certainly that legacy is far too little known.

Tudor Hart identified herself as a “photographic reporter”. She was, but, typically, she was also too modest. She had a rare ability to harness her burning social
conscience to her immense talent as a documentary photographer.

This biography-in-the-round eschews chronology in favour of snapshots of different aspects of Tudor Hart’s creativity, from her love of children (she trained in London with Maria Montessori and was the mother of an, almost certainly undiagnosed, severely autistic son); to her political activism and her artistic influences and experimentation. It is in welcome contrast to the recent sensationalising of her as a Soviet agent, and of her relationships with Deutsch and Philby.